Beijing Winter Olympics opens with Uyghur athlete as final torchbearer

The Beijing Winter Games opened on Friday (February 4) night in a snow and ice themed ceremony at the Bird’s Nest stadium that concluded with the cauldron lit by two young Chinese Olympians, one of them a member of China’s Uyghur minority.

During a performance that went longer than scheduled on a frigid night in the Chinese capital, President Xi Jinping declared the opening of an Olympics whose preparations were beset by the pandemic and criticism over human rights in China.

Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a 20-year-old cross-country skiier born in Altay in the western Xinjiang region, lit the cauldron along with Zhao Jiawen, 21, who competes in Nordic combined, finishing a torch relay whose final runners were Chinese Olympians from recent decades.

The identity of the final cauldron lighter is traditionally kept secret until the last moment, and Dinigeer’s inclusion was noteworthy since China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority – which Washington deems genocide – was the trigger for a diplomatic boycott by several Western countries including the United States.

China rejects allegations of human rights abuses and sought to convey a spirit of inclusion during Friday night’s ceremony, in which the Chinese flag was passed among 56 people representing its different ethnic groups before it was raised for the national anthem.

Friday’s ceremony in a partially-filled Bird’s Nest stadium – the scene of Beijing’s triumphant 2008 Summer Games launch – was filled with imagery of ice and snow, with Xi’s declaration followed by red-suited “skaters” sliding across virtual ice.

They were accompanied by a version of the John Lennon song “Imagine”, which has become a fixture at Olympics ceremonies.

Held on the first day of Spring by the Chinese calendar, the ceremony began with a performance by dancers waving glowing green stalks to convey the vitality of the season, followed by an explosion of white and green fireworks that spelled the word “Spring”.

On a three-dimensional cube resembling a block of ice, lasers carved figures from each of the previous 23 Winter Games. The block was then “broken” by ice hockey players, enabling the Olympic rings to emerge, all in white.

That was followed by the traditional “parade of nations”, with each of the 91 delegations preceded by a women carrying a placard in the shape of a snowflake resembling a Chinese knot.

In keeping with Olympic tradition, the parade was led into the stadium by Greece with the rest ordered by stroke number in the first character of their Chinese name, which meant Turkey was second with host China going last and drawing roars from the stadium crowd.

Directed by Zhang Yimou, reprising his role from Beijing’s 2008 Summer Games triumph, the event featured 3,000 performers – most of them children and teenagers – on a stage comprised of 11,600 square metres of high-definition LED screen resembling an ice surface.

All of the performers were ordinary people from Beijing and nearby Hebei province, with “the Story of a Snowflake” its central thread.

With temperatures of about -4C (25F) at the start – not enough to daunt the shirtless flagbearer from American Samoa – the show lasted two hours and 20 minutes, longer than scheduled.

The crowd itself was pared down, with organisers deciding last month not to sell tickets to Olympic events to curtail the spread of COVID-19. A “closed loop” separates competitors and other personnel from the Chinese public throughout the Olympics.

Though smaller in scale than the Summer Games – dubbed China’s “coming out party” in 2008 – the Beijing Winter Olympics are being staged by a much more prosperous, powerful, confident and confrontational China under Xi.

China’s hosting of the Winter Games has drawn criticism, and countries including the United States, Britain and Australia staged diplomatic boycotts, meaning they did not send government representatives to the Games.

Russian president Vladimir Putin arrived on Friday for a meeting with Xi ahead of the opening ceremony, bringing a deal to increase natural gas supply to China amid rising tensions with the West and winning a pledge from Xi to deepen mutual cooperation.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV noted that Putin, like China, expressed opposition to the “politicisation” of the Games.

The official start of the Games will come as a relief to organisers navigating the extreme complexity of staging them during a pandemic while adhering to China’s zero-COVID policy.

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